R3 Launches Corda Enterprise With First-Ever 'Blockchain Firewall'

More than a year in the making, Corda Enterprise has arrived.

Announced Tuesday, blockchain startup R3 has released a paid version of its signature open-source Corda blockchain technology, one that offers added features aimed at regulated institutions including 24/7 support, disaster recovery and more.

As part of the commercial rollout of its Corda Enterprise platform, blockchain startup R3 is touting such advances as the "First-ever Blockchain Application Firewall."

Not a traditional firewall, the term denotes how Corda is able to limit communication between blockchain nodes operating in different environments, and with different informational needs from their network.

A possible barrier to interoperability, R3 CTO Richard Gendal Brown said his team saw the possibility to "Achieve the best of both worlds" by allowing as much connectivity as needed between Corda nodes running in closed and open environments.

The firewall "Protects the Corda node from the outside whilst allowing through just the traffic that should come through," Brown said.

"We are at the point where the first I often hear of a Corda usage is when the project issues a press release, or we see questions on our Slack channel," said Brown.

R3 and Brown are touting the Blockchain Firewall as a feature that should make Corda more appealing to businesses when compared to traditional open-source blockchains.

"That separation of the nodes into those two pieces is the Blockchain Corda Firewall and we think it will be transformational."

"If I deploy a set of Corda nodes over to the left and then deploy a set of Corda nodes over to the right, it would be a tragedy if they couldn't interoperate with each other," said Brown.